BusinessRx Community

These blog entries are written by industry experts and leaders. We consider this content to be a good read for any software developer or web technologist.

Browse by Tags

All Tags » MVC » Silverlight   (RSS)

• .NET
• ASP.NET
• Atlas
• Community News
• IIS7
• Link Listing
• Talks
• Visual Studio
• WPF

• Nov 6th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight and WPF

  Last week was our big PDC conference, and I've been busy catching up back at work this week.  I'm hoping to publish a bunch of new posts soon (including some on the PDC announcements we made).  Until then, here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET 6 New ASP.NET Dynamic Data Videos: Joe Stagner has just published 6 new videos on the www.asp.net site that cover how to use the cool new ASP.NET Dynamic Data functionality introduced with .NET 3.5 SP1. Download Hotfix: False C# Compilation Errors for ASP.NET Code Behind Files with VS 2008 SP1: The C# team added support for live semantic errors with background compilation in VS 2008 SP1.  There were a few cases where this caused false errors to be shown with ASP.NET Web site projects.  You can fix these either by disabling live semantic errors (tools->options allows you to disable this), or by downloading a recent hotfix patch which is now public.  Omar Khan has a useful blog post with more details on it. Examining ASP.NET 2.0's Membership, Roles and Profile - Part 13: Scott Mitchell has another post in his great series of ASP.NET security articles.  This one covers how to create a login screen that allows admin users to log in as another user in the user database.  For more on ASP.NET security, also check out Joe Stagner's recent ASP.NET Security Videos. ASP.NET Patterns Developers Should Know: Alex Homer from the Patterns and Practices (PAG) team at Microsoft has a nice article that introduces a number of common design patterns (MVC and MVP, Repository, Singleton, etc) and how you can apply them within ASP.NET applications.  If you are interested in learning more about pattern based development I also highly recommend reading the Head First Design Patterns book (which has more than 250 positive reviews on Amazon). ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery Rich jQuery Intellisense with VS 2008: Last week we published a new jQuery intellisense file for VS 2008 that delivers super-rich and accurate javascript intellisense when using jQuery.  Jeff's article describes how to download and start using it today. ASP.NET and jQuery: Stephen Walther delivered an awesome talk on using jQuery with ASP.NET at the PDC conference last week.  You can now watch it online for free.  Click here to download his code samples and powerpoint presentation. jQuery Primer Part 1 and Part 2: Karl Seguin has two nice posts that provide a quick overview of some of the basics of how to use jQuery.  Also check out Rick Strahl's longer Introduction to jQuery article (which I've previously linked to) for a longer jQuery tutorial. ASP.NET AJAX Futures: Bertrand Le Roy delivered an awesome talk on the new ASP.NET AJAX features coming soon at the PDC conference last week.  You can now watch it online for free as well as download his slides and code-samples. Working with ADO.NET Data Services with ASP.NET AJAX: Jim Wang has a nice blog post that demonstrates how to take advantage of the new ASP.NET AJAX features (client templating, ADO.NET data service support, etc) to build a data driven AJAX solution. ASP.NET MVC Bin Deployable ASP.NET MVC: Phil Haack has a useful blog post that describes step-by-step how to enable \bin directory deployment of ASP.NET MVC.  This enables you to deploy ASP.NET MVC based applications on remote hosting servers that do not have ASP.NET MVC already installed (which means you don't need them to run any setup or do extra steps for your application to work). Donut Caching in ASP.NET MVC: Phil Haack has a great blog post that talks about how to implement substitution output caching with ASP.NET MVC.  I coined the name "donut caching" for this technique with a previous blog post I did on using substitution output caching with ASP.NET Web Forms.  Phil covers it for ASP.NET MVC. Grouping Controllers with ASP.NET MVC: Phil Haack has another great post that covers how to segment a ASP.NET MVC application into multiple "areas" or "modules" - which can optionally be developed in separate projects and merged into one large master application.  Also check out Steve Sanderson's follow-up post with more ideas on this topic. Silverlight and WPF Silverlight Toolkit Released: Last week at PDC we shipped the first release of the Silverlight Toolkit.  This is a free download that works with Silverlight 2, and delivers a whole slew of awesome controls and features (including new charting controls, new layout managers, treeview, viewbox, and more).  A must-have download for every Silverlight  developer. Silverlight Unit Test Framework and Source Released: Jeff Wilcox shares all the great details about the release of our new Silverlight Unit Testing framework (which includes source that can be modified/reused however you want). Updated WPF Performance Profiling Tool: The WPF team recently posted an update to their excellent WPF Performance Profiling Tool.  Definitely something to check out if you are doing WPF development. WPF & Silverlight LOB Form Layout - Searching for a Better Solution: Karl Shifflett has another great WPF blog post that covers a cool way to perform flexible form layout for LOB scenarios. Hope this helps, Scott Posted Thursday, November 06, 2008 3:34 AM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: ASP.NET, Atlas, WPF, Silverlight, Link Listing, MVC

• April 28th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight

  Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Displaying the Number of Active Users on an ASP.NET Site: Scott Mitchell continues his excellent series on ASP.NET's membership, roles, and profile support.  In this article he discusses how to use ASP.NET's Membership features to estimate and display the number of active users currently visiting a site. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Update: The ASP.NET team last week released an update of the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data feature.  This update adds several new features including cleaner URL support using the same URL routing feature that ASP.NET MVC uses, as well as better confirmation, foreign-key, and template support.  ASP.NET Testing with Ivonna: Travis Illig blogs about a new testing framework named Ivonna that enables unit testing of ASP.NET web forms. ASP.NET AJAX ASP.NET AJAX UI Templates: Nikhil Kothari from the ASP.NET team has a cool post that shows off a prototype he has been working on that enables clean client-side AJAX templating of UI.  ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit TabContainer Theme Gallery: Matt Berseth has another of his excellent posts - this one shows off a bunch of cool themes you can use to style the TabContainer control in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Reducing Page Load Times with UpdatePanels and Timers: Paul Glavich posts of a cool trick you can use with tab controls to asynchronously load their content in the background in order to improve perceived page load time. Why do ASP.NET AJAX page methods have to be static? Dave Ward has a useful article that talks about the page methods feature in ASP.NET AJAX, and explains why they are static methods. JQuery Intellisense in VS 2008: Brad Vincent posts about using the VS 2008 Web Development Hot-Fix we released in February to get a nice JavaScript intellisense experience in Visual Studio 2008 when using the JQuery AJAX library. ASP.NET MVC Inversion of Control, ASP.NET MVC and Unit Testing: Fredrik Kalseth has a cool article that talks about the concepts behind inversion of control (IOC) and how you can use this with ASP.NET MVC to better isolate dependencies and enable better unit testing of your code. Stephen Walther's ASP.NET MVC Talk: Stephen Walther delivered a many-hour ASP.NET MVC post conference talk at ASP.NET Connections last week.  You can download his slides + demos for free.  Also check out his previous posts on Unit Tests with Visual Studio 2008 and TDD with Rhino Mocks. MVC Contrib Project Update: Eric Hexter blogs about some of the latest updates to the open source MvcContrib project to work with the latest ASP.NET MVC interim source release. Testing Action Results with ASP.NET MVC: Jeremy Skinner blogs about some cool extension method helpers he has added to MvcContrib to enable pretty sweet testing of Controller actions. MVC Membership Starter Kit - 1.2 Release: Troy Goode has posted an update to his excellent MVC Membership Starter Kit.  This version works with the interim ASP.NET MVC source release. Silverlight Defining Silverlight DataGrid Columns at Runtime: Scott Morrison from the Silverlight team has a cool blog post that talks about how to define Silverlight DataGrid Columns via code at runtime.  Visit my Silverlight links page for more DataGrid posts. Silverlight HTTP Networking Stack (Part 1), (Part 2), (Part 3): Karen Corby from the Silverlight team has a great three part blog series that talks about the new Silverlight 2 networking stack and how cross domain security works with it. Pushing Data to a Silverlight Client with Sockets (Part 1) and (Part 2): Dan Wahlin demonstrates how to implement a "GameStream" socket server and connect to it from a Silverlight client using Silverlight 2's built-in network sockets support.  Silverlight - the Song: Spike Xavier and Dan Wahlin have posted another of their unique and special songs. :-) Hope this helps, Scott Posted Tuesday, April 29, 2008 1:35 AM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: ASP.NET, Atlas, Silverlight, Link Listing, MVC

• Slides from my ASP.NET Connections Orlando Talks

  Last week I presented at the ASP.NET Connections Conference in Orlando.  I gave a general session talk on Monday, and then two breakout talks later that day.  You can download my slides+samples below: General Session The slides for my keynote can be downloaded here.  In the talk I demonstrated how to debug the .NET Framework source code.  You can learn how to set this up with VS 2008 here.  I also demonstrated building a site using the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data support - which you can learn more about here.  I also demonstrated using the new ASP.NET MVC Framework - which you can learn more about here. I also showed off the new Hard Rock Memorabilia site built with Silverlight 2.  You can try out the Hard Rock application yourself here.  You can learn more about Silverlight from my links page here. Building .NET Applications with Silverlight The slides + demos for Silverlight breakout talk can be downloaded here. You can learn more about Silverlight from my links page here.  In particular, I recommend reading my tutorial posts here and here. ASP.NET MVC The slides + demos for my ASP.NET MVC talk can be downloaded here. You can learn more about the latest ASP.NET MVC source refresh here.  Stephen Walther also just posted a really good set of slides + demos from his post conference tutorial on ASP.NET MVC here. Hope this helps, Scott Posted Monday, April 28, 2008 12:51 AM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: .NET, ASP.NET, Talks, Silverlight, MVC

• April 11th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio, Silverlight

  Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET More ASP.NET Security Tutorials: The last three of Scott Mitchell's excellent ASP.NET security tutorials.  His final three articles cover how to select user accounts, recover and change passwords, and unlock and approve user accounts. Building a VS 2008 Styled Grid with the ListView and DataPager Controls: Matt Berseth has a great article that talks about techniques you can use with the new ASP.NET 3.5 ListView control to create a nicely styled Grid UI - while preserving total control over the HTML and CSS used.  Also read his follow-up post here that talks about how to achieve the same UI with the GridView control. 50 Useful CSS Tips and Tricks: A useful page that provides a nice listing of various CSS tips, tricks and tools you can use for common web scenarios. Using a DataPager with the GridView Control - Implementing IPageableItemContainer: Matt Berseth has a cool article that shows how to use the new IPageableItemContainer interface to implement paging support with the new ASP.NET 3.5 DataPager control. ASP.NET AJAX Accessible UpdatePanel: Bertrand Le Roy from the ASP.NET team has an article that describes how to make the ASP.NET AJAX's UpdatePanel control accessible for screen-readers. ASP.NET AJAX Meets Virtual Earth: Alessandro Gallo, author of the excellent ASP.NET AJAX in Action book, has a nice series of articles that talks about using ASP.NET AJAX with Virtual Earth to implement mapping on your site. Faster Page Loading by Moving ASP.NET AJAX Scripts after visible content: Omar Al Zabir (the co-founder of www.PageFlakes.com) has a great article that describes a nice technique you can use to improve the perceived loading performance of an ASP.NET AJAX page.  I also highly recommend reading Omar's great Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book to learn some of his other suggestions and techniques. 3 Tips for Working with ASP.NET AJAX's TabContainer Control: Matt Berseth continues his great articles on ASP.NET AJAX with some tips on working with the TabContainer control in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Building ASP.NET AJAX Components: Mike Ormond has written an excellent 8-part series that covers building re-usable ASP.NET AJAX components that work on both the client and server. ASP.NET MVC An Introduction to ASP.NET MVC using VB: Bill Burrows from www.MyVBprof.com has put together a great set of online videos that introduce ASP.NET MVC using Visual Basic.  Also make sure to check out his video series on LINQ to XML using VB and LINQ to SQL using VB. ASP.NET MVC: Membership Starter Kit: Troy Goode has a built an awesome membership starter kit for ASP.NET MVC that provides registration and login pages for users to authenticate on your site, as well as a set of administration functionality that allows admins to create/manage users and roles.  Download it here. ASP.NET MVC: Action Filter for Handling Errors: Troy Goode has another good post that provides some ASP.NET MVC action filters for catching and handling runtime errors. How to Enable Pretty URLs with ASP.NET MVC and IIS6: James Geurts posts a useful article that describes how to enable extension-less URLs with ASP.NET MVC on IIS6 (note: you do not need to configure anything special with ASP.NET MVC on IIS7 to enable extension-less URL support). Visual Studio PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008: A free set of useful extensions for VS 2008 that add a bunch of cool features to the IDE. Coding Productivity: Macros, Shortcuts and Snippets: Kirill Osenkov has a nice blog post that shows of how to use Visual Studio's macro feature to custom record useful time-savers. Silverlight Dave Campbell's Excellent Silverlight Link Series: Dave Campbell posts a regular series of links to new Silverlight articles and content on the web.  I highly recommend subscribing to his blog if you want to stay current with all the latest Silverlight articles and posts. Silverlight 2 Map / DataGrid Tutorial: Jason Zander has a great two-part Silverlight tutorial that demonstrates how to build a nice data-driven application that integrates a map control with a datagrid to filter and analyze data. CRUD operations with Silverlight 2, WCF and LINQ to SQL: Ronnie Saurenmann from the Swiss MSDN team has a nice video that shows off some basics of how to support inserts, updates and deletes using Silverlight 2 connected via WCF to a LINQ to SQL backend. Writing a Templated Silverlight 2 Control: Shawn Burke has a great tutorial post that walksthrough how to build a templated Silverlight control that implements an expand/collapse control. Hope this helps, Scott Posted Friday, April 11, 2008 3:04 AM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: .NET, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, Silverlight, Link Listing, MVC

• March 28th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio, Silverlight, .NET

  Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Three New ASP.NET Security Tutorials Now Available: Scott Mitchell continues his great ASP.NET security tutorials. These three new ones cover creating and managing roles, assigning roles to users, and implementing role based authorization.  You can also find more security articles by reading posts on my blog tagged with security. .NET Libraries to Digg, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other Web 2.0 APIs: Scott Hanselman's latest "weekly source code" review looks at .NET APIs that you can use to call popular web 2.0 services. Hangs and how to Solve Them (Part 1) and (Part 2): Tom has some useful posts that talk about deadlocks and request queuing in ASP.NET, and how to detect and debug what might be causing them. ASP.NET AJAX Building ASP.NET AJAX Controls (Part 1), (Part 2), and (Part 3): Mike Ormond has started a nice blog post series that talks about how to build ASP.NET AJAX Controls.  Make sure to check out Part 2 - Components and Part 3 - Properties and Events as well. New ASP.NET AJAX "How Do I?" Videos: Joe Stagner has published a number of new ASP.NET AJAX "How Do I?" videos.  Learn about the re-order control, retrieving values from server-side AJAX controls, two techniques for triggering updates to update panels, and using the cascading drop down control. Real-Time Progress Bar with ASP.NET AJAX: SingingEels shows a technique for displaying real-time progress notifications using AJAX as a long-lived activity runs on the server. Using JQuery to Consume ASP.NET AJAX JSON Web Services: Dave Ward has a nice post that describes how to use the JQuery AJAX library on the client to call an ASP.NET Web Service on the server that is JSON enabled (using ASP.NET AJAX on the server).  ASP.NET MVC Kigg - Building a Digg Clone with ASP.NET MVC: Kazi Manzur Rashid published an excellent Digg-clone sample built with ASP.NET MVC last February.  He recently updated the code to work with ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 (full details here).  You can download the latest version of his source code here. ASP.NET MVC In-Depth: The Life of an ASP.NET Request: Stephen Walther has a great post that details the exact steps that occur when an ASP.NET MVC request executes.  ASP.NET MVC Action Filters - Caching and Compression: Kazi Manzur Rashid has another great post that shows how to use the new ActionFilterAttribute support in ASP.NET MVC to implement output caching and compression attributes. Read this quickstart article to learn more about how Action Filters work, or watch Scott Hanselman's video that covers them. Defining Routes using Regular Expressions with ASP.NET MVC: Someone asked me the other day how to use regular expressions to define route rules with ASP.NET MVC.  Turns out Fredrik Kalseth already has a nice sample that shows how to-do this. Testing with the ASP.NET MVC Framework: Simone Chiaretta has a great article that discusses how to test controllers using ASP.NET MVC Preview 2.  Note: the next ASP.NET MVC preview release will include a number of refactorings that will simplify controller testing considerably (and avoid the need to mock anything for common scenarios). Test-Driven Development with Visual Studio 2008 Unit Tests: Stephen Walther has a really nice post that describe how the unit testing features now built-in VS 2008 Professional work (using an ASP.NET MVC project).  Also check out Stephen's excellent Introduction to Rhino Mocks blog post that describes how to use the open source Rhino Mocks framework with VS unit test projects. Visual Studio VS 2008 Web Deployment Hot-Fix Roll-Up Now Available for non-English Languages: Last month we shipped a hot-fix release that fixes a number of bugs, adds a few features, and improves performance for web development scenarios in VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express.  Last month's release only worked with the English-language VS 2008 products.  Yesterday we shipped an update that now works for all VS 2008 languages except Portuguese and Russian (which are still to come in the future).  Hotfix Available for VB Performance Issue in VS 2008: The Visual Basic team recently released a hotfix as well that addresses a performance issue with large files that contain XML documentation.  Read this post to learn more about how to download it if you are running into this issue. 10 Ways to Boost your Productivity with C# and VS 2008: John W Powell shares a few tips and tricks on how to improve your productivity with C# and VS 2008. Showing Hack, Undone, and Custom Tokens in the Task List: Sara Ford has some cool VS tips of the day posts that talk about what you can do with the task list.  Also read her How to Create and View Todos in the Task List, Assigning Priority to Items in the Task List, Create Shortcuts in the Task List, Create User Tasks in the Task List, and Keyboard Navigation of items in the Task List. Silverlight Using the Silverlight DataGrid and Defining Columns for a Silverlight DataGrid: Scott Morrison has started a great series of posts that describe how to use the new Silverlight 2 DataGrid control (which he is the program manager for - so he definitely knows his stuff!). Using Silverlight 2's DataGrid with WCF + LINQ to SQL: This 15 minute video blog demonstrates how to build a LINQ to SQL object model on the server and publish it using WCF.  It then demonstrates how to build a Silverlight client that uses the new Silverlight DataGrid control, and which calls the WCF service to retrieve the LINQ to SQL data to populate it with. Simple Editing of Web Service Data in a DataGrid: Mike Taulty has a nice blog post that shows how to create a WCF service on the server, and then use it from a Silverlight 2 client to retrieve data, bind it to a DataGrid, allow users to update rows, add/delete rows, and then save it back to the server using Silverlight 2 Beta1. Sorting with Silverlight 2's DataGrid Control: The DataGrid control in Silverlight 2 Beta1 doesn't yet have built-in column sorting support (it is coming in Beta2).  That hasn't stopped Matt Berseth though!  In this post he shows how to implement sorting using a custom header column approach.  Also check out Matt's post here, which provides a DataGrid test page that shows off a number of the current DataGrid features. Open Source Silverlight Charts with VisiFire: Silverlight doesn't yet have built-in charting controls.  The good news is that the folks at Webyog just released a really cool set of open source Silverlight charting controls (complete with animation support) that enable you to easily build great looking charts.  Their model makes it super easy to use the chart components within existing HTML or AJAX applications. .NET FormatWith and DateTime Extension Methods: James Newton-King and Fredrik Kalseth have some nice posts and samples that demonstrate how to use the new extension method feature in the VB and C# languages in VS 2008 to create some useful convenience libraries.  Dependency Injection Explained: James Kovacs has a nice MSDN article that explains how to build more loosely coupled applications and enabled dependency injection.  Also read Scott Hanselman's that list of .NET Dependency Injector Containers (IOC) post.  Matthew Podwysocki also covers the new Unity IOC in his posts here and here. Hope this helps, Scott Posted Friday, March 28, 2008 4:08 AM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: .NET, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, Atlas, Silverlight, Link Listing, MVC

• MIX08

  MIX is a Microsoft web development conference we hold in Las Vegas each year.  MIX tends to be a pretty fun event, both because it covers cutting edge content (we used MIX07 to announce our Silverlight plans), and also because it tends to attract a really diverse set of attendees (including both those who use Microsoft technology today, and a large % of attendees who don't).  The conference structure includes a healthy blend of sessions and interactive panels, and the layout and organization is designed to facilitate great conversations. This year's MIX is being held March 5th-7th in Las Vegas.  Ray Ozzie and I are both giving keynotes the first day of the event, and Steve Ballmer and Guy Kawasaki will be doing a keynote the second day of the event. The conference (and especially my keynote) is going to cover a lot of new web technology.  Attendees will be able to attend sessions covering: IE 8 IIS 7.0 ASP.NET (including ASP.NET 3.5, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, and ASP.NET Dynamic Data)  VS 2008 and Expression Studio WPF Silverlight 2 And much more.... Channel 9 recently did an interview with me where I talked about some of these new technologies.  In Part 1 of the interview I talked about IIS7, and in Part 2 of the interview I talked about ASP.NET, WPF and Silverlight 2. Register Soon Or You'll Miss Your Chance MIX is held at a smaller venue then some of our larger events like TechEd and PDC.  This gives the conference a more intimate feel (which is fun).  It also means that it sells out each year, and once it is sold out it is really sold out.  Last year I received about 50 emails from people begging for tickets after it was full, and many people even flew to the event hoping to somehow be let in at the door (only to be unfortunately told they couldn't get in).  Unfortunately because of size constraints (and fire marshal restrictions) once it is sold out there really are no more tickets to be had.  Even my own team members get turned away if they haven't registered in time. This year's registration is filling up faster than any of the previous MIX conferences.  If you want to attend I highly recommend registering really soon to ensure you can go.  You can learn more about the event and register online here. Hope to see some of you there - it is going to be fun.... Scott Posted Friday, February 01, 2008 12:38 AM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: .NET, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, Community News, IIS7, WPF, Silverlight, MVC

• .NET Web Product Roadmap (ASP.NET, Silverlight, IIS7)

  Last week we shipped Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5.  This release is a big one for .NET, and delivers a ton of new capabilities and improvements for web, client, office and mobile development. Over the next few months we'll be delivering a series of additional products that build on top of this VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 foundation, and make .NET development even better.  Below is a road-map of some of the upcoming initiatives and releases for .NET web development that my team is currently working on for the months ahead: Releasing the Source Code for the .NET Framework Libraries We announced last month that we'll provide the ability for developers to download and browse the source code of the .NET Framework libraries, as well as enable integrated source debugging of them using Visual Studio 2008.  You can learn more about this in my blog post here. We are finishing up the final deployment of the source servers that host this now, and will be publishing instructions on how to enable the integrated debugging experience within Visual Studio 2008 shortly.  I'll blog detailed steps on how to turn this feature on once it is available. ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Release VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 include a ton of new features for ASP.NET development.  We are planning to deliver even more ASP.NET functionality next year with a "ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions" release.  The first public preview of this will be available for download next week on the web. Next week's ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions preview release will include: ASP.NET MVC: This model view controller (MVC) framework for ASP.NET provides a structured model that enables a clear separation of concerns within web applications, and makes it easier to unit test your code and support a TDD workflow.  It also helps provide more control over the URLs you publish in your applications, and more control over the HTML that is emitted from them.  You can learn more about it from Part 1 of my ASP.NET MVC Tutorial series.  I'm hoping to find time this weekend to write and post Part 2 of the series. ASP.NET AJAX Improvements: New ASP.NET AJAX features in the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions release will include better browser history support (back/forward button integration, and server-side history management support via a new <asp:history> server control), improved AJAX content linking support with permalinks, and additional JavaScript library improvements. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Support: The ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions release will deliver new features that enable faster creation of data driven web sites.  It provides a rich scaffolding framework, and enables rapid data driven site development using both ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.NET MVC. ASP.NET Silverlight Support: With the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions release we'll deliver support for easily integrating Silverlight within your ASP.NET applications.  Included will be new controls that make it easy to integrate Silverlight video/media and interactive content within your sites. ADO.NET Data Services: In parallel with the ASP.NET Extensions release we will also be releasing the ADO.NET Entity Framework.  This provides a new modeling framework that enables developers to define a conceptual model of a database schema that closely aligns to a real world view of the information.  We will also be shipping a new set of data services (codename "Astoria") that make it easy to expose REST based API endpoints from within your ASP.NET applications. Silverlight 2.0 Release Two months ago we shipped Silverlight 1.0 for Mac and Windows, and announced our plans to deliver Silverlight on Linux.  Silverlight 1.0 is focused on enabling rich media scenarios in a browser, and supports a JavaScript/AJAX programming model. Next year we will be releasing a major update of Silverlight that focuses on enabling rich Internet applications.  This release will include a cross-platform, cross-browser version of the .NET Framework, and will enable a rich .NET development platform in the browser.  Earlier this year we shipped an early Alpha containing some of the basic functionality of the release.  Our next public preview will add considerably to this feature set.  Some of the new .NET specific features in the next public Silverlight preview will include: WPF UI Framework: The current Silverlight Alpha release only includes basic controls support and a managed API for UI drawing.  The next public Silverlight preview will add support for the higher level features of the WPF UI framework.  These include: the extensible control framework model, layout manager support, two-way data-binding support, and control template and skinning support.  The WPF UI Framework features in Silverlight will be a compatible subset of the WPF UI Framework features in last week's .NET Framework 3.5 release. Rich Controls: Silverlight will deliver a rich set of controls that make building Rich Internet Applications much easier.  The next Silverlight preview release will add support for core form controls (textbox, checkbox, radiobutton, etc), built-in layout management controls (StackPanel, Grid, etc), common functionality controls (TabControl, Slider, ScrollViewer, ProgressBar, etc) and data manipulation controls (DataGrid, etc). Rich Networking Support: Silverlight will deliver rich networking support.  The next Silverlight preview release will add support for REST, POX, RSS, and WS* communication.  It will also add support for cross domain network access (so that Silverlight clients can access resources and data from any trusted source on the web). Rich Base Class Library Support: Silverlight will include a rich .NET base class library of functionality (collections, IO, generics, threading, globalization, XML, local storage, etc).  The next Silverlight preview release will also add built-in support for LINQ to XML and richer HTML DOM API integration. Previously we've been referring to this .NET-enabled Silverlight release as "Silverlight V1.1".  After stepping back and looking at all the new features in it (the above list is only a subset - there are many more we aren't sharing yet), we've realized that calling it a point release doesn't really reflect the true nature of it.  Consequently we have decided to change the name and refer to it as "Silverlight V2.0" going forward. We will be releasing a Beta of Silverlight 2.0 in Q1 of 2008.  This Beta will support a Go-Live license that enables developers to begin building and deploying Silverlight 2.0 applications. We will also be releasing a free Visual Studio 2008 tools update that provides great Silverlight 2.0 tools support within Visual Studio 2008, and enables developers to easily build Silverlight applications using any .NET language.  We will be supporting Silverlight development with both the Visual Studio 2008 Standard/Professional products, as well as with the free Visual Studio 2008 Express editions. I'm going to be starting a new blog tutorial series in a few weeks that discusses how to build Silverlight 2.0 applications, and show off the new features in more depth.  Stay tuned for more details soon. IIS 7.0 Early next year we'll ship the final release of IIS 7.0 as part of the Windows Server 2008 release.  As I've blogged about in the past, IIS 7.0 is a major update of our web-server stack, and introduces a significantly new and improved extensibility, configuration and administration architecture.  One of the really cool things about IIS 7.0 is that it is all nicely integrated with the .NET Framework, and enables you to use any .NET language to extend and customize the server.  You can now easily do things in VB and C# that previously required writing a pretty gnarly C++ ISAPI.  The deployment, management and administration of web applications on the server is also now nicely unified across IIS and ASP.NET. We will also shortly begin sharing details of a new web application deployment framework for IIS that enables you to easily automate the deployment of web applications on either a single server or across a web farm of machines.  It will make it easy to version your web applications (including allowing you to quickly roll back to previous versions), as well as automatically provision them across multiple servers.  It also enables the full automation of deployment tasks (including via both command-line and PowerShell scripting APIs).  The combination of IIS7 with this web deployment framework will enable you to deploy and scale your ASP.NET server applications better than ever before. Summary Last week's VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 release was a huge step forward for .NET development.  The release not only delivered a ton of great new language, runtime and tool features, but even more importantly provided a really solid foundation that we'll be building upon in the months and years ahead.  Stay tuned to my blog for more details about each of the above releases. Hope this helps, Scott Posted Thursday, November 29, 2007 12:22 PM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: .NET, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, Community News, IIS7, Silverlight, MVC

• Nov 17th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, VS 2008, .NET 3.5, IIS7, Silverlight

  Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET GridViewControlExtender - Row MouseOver and Click Styles, Header Cell MouseOver Styles, and 5 Themes Based on Google's Personalized HomePage: Matt Berseth has three cool posts that show off techniques you can use to customize the look and feel of the ASP.NET GridView control. ASP.NET AJAX Exploring one of Microsoft AJAX's often overlooked features: AddHandler: Dave Ward starts a new series covering some of ASP.NET AJAX's client-side JavaScript features, and begins the series by exploring the $AddHandler method, which allows you to attach a client side Javascript event handler to any DOM element on a a page. Yahoo UI Style "Tip of the Day" Dialog using the ASP.NET AJAX PopupControl, DynamicPopulate and DragPanel Extender Controls: Matt Berseth has a nice article that describes how to implement a "Tip of the Day" popup control using ASP.NET AJAX. VS 2008 JavaScript Intellisense: A Reference for the "Reference" Tag: The VS Web Tools Team published this useful reference that details how to use the // <reference> directive within JavaScript pages to reference other JavaScript files, web services, and JavaScript snippets embedded in assemblies.  You can learn more about VS 2008's JavaScript intellisense support from my previous VS 2008 JavaScript Intellisense post. "Don't Ask Me Again" Delete Confirm Using a ModalPopup and ASP.NET's Profile Properties: Matt Berseth has a cool tutorial that demonstrates how to to use ASP.NET AJAX to prompt a ModalPopup to end users - and then save the results within the ASP.NET Profile system. JQuery TabContainer Theme with Tab Transition Animations: Matt Berseth has a nice post that describes how you can add more animation to your site - this time building an ASP.NET AJAX extender that provides JQuery-like animation effects.  ASP.NET MVC Build an RSS Feed with the new ASP.NET MVC Framework: Brad Abrams demonstrates a simple example of how to build a RSS blog feed using the ASP.NET MVC Framework. Use Spring.NET to enable Dependency Injection on a ASP.NET MVC Controller: Fredrik Normen walks through a simple sample that demonstrates how to enable dependency injection of a data repository object to a Controller with the ASP.NET MVC Framework.  Specifically, he shows using Spring.NET and the IControllerFactory interface provided with ASP.NET MVC. Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Visual Basic 2008 Keybinding Reference Poster and Visual C# 2008 Keybinding Reference Poster: The final release of Visual Studio 2008 will be available for download very shortly (keep an eye on my blog for details).  To help get ready you can download and print off these two posters for free.  They detail the default keybindings for the VB and C# profiles.  .NET 3.5 Reference Poster: Here is an updated .NET Framework Common Namespaces and Types Poster that you can also print out for free.  It details some of the new namespaces and important types in .NET 3.5. Sound Events for Visual Studio: Apparently you you assign sounds to fire when Visual Studio events happen (for example: a build error).  I can't think of a really good use for this other than to annoy co-workers.  Potentially something fun you can enable on their machine when they go to lunch. IIS 7.0 Running 32-bit and 64-bit ASP.NET versions at the same time in different worker processes: With IIS6 you either had to run all web worker processes in 32-bit mode, or all of them in 64-bit mode.  There was no easy way to mix and match depending on the application (you couldn't have one 32-bit ASP.NET application that needed to use a C++ component on the same machine as another 64-bit ASP.NET application in a separate application pool).  With IIS 7.0 this is now supported and easy to enable.  Rakki Muthukumar from Microsoft support describes how to configure this. WPF and Silverlight Silverlight 1.1 Hebrew and Arabic Language Support: Silverlight today doesn't yet support right-to-left text layout.  Justin-Josef Angel has put together an absolutely awesome CodePlex project that enables this support.  Download the code from CodePlex today, and read his detailed tutorial on it here. .NET 3.5 Add-In Model: Jack Gudenkauf is a developer on my team who has driven the design of the new System.AddIn namespace in .NET 3.5.  This namespace makes it easier to build add-in extensibility to your client applications.  Among other things, this enables you to isolate addins and WPF controls across application domain and process boundaries (here is a sample of one).  Watch Jack's Channel9 video to learn more. Data Binding in WPF: A nice MSDN Magazine article from John Papa that describes some of the basics of how WPF's binding model works. Josh Twist also has some good WPF databinding companion articles that complement this here and here.  To learn WPF in more detail, I highly recommend Adam Nathan's excellent WPF Unleashed book (still 5 stars after 45 reviews on Amazon.com).  The next public release of Silverlight 1.1 will support the same powerful databinding model that is in the full WPF, and will make building data aware applications much easier. Hope this helps, Scott Posted Saturday, November 17, 2007 3:47 PM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: .NET, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, Atlas, WPF, Silverlight, Link Listing, MVC